May. 20, 2012

Highlights From the Archives

Book Review Desk

The trick to travel writing, says Paul Theroux, is to discover places that force you to look rather than merely sightsee. And it's a paradox of today's plugged-in world that such places are as likely to be found 10 miles from home as 10,000.

June 18, 2000artsReview

The Arts/Cultural Desk

Although this book begins evenhandedly enough, it finishes by creating an acidic portrait of V.S. Naipaul as a bitter, selfish man -- often cruel, dismissive, bigoted, misogynistic, snobbish, arrogant and cheap. At the same time, it is a book that unwittingly leaves the reader with a picture of the author, Paul Theroux, as a vindictive younger writer who evolved from worshipful apprentice to resentful colleague.

September 22, 1998artsReview

Cultural Desk

Paul Theroux's latest novel, his 20th, is a kind of secret-sharer story, the comparison to Joseph Conrad's short novel pretty apt in Mr. Theroux's case. In his 20 novels and 10 travel books, Mr. Theroux has established himself in the tradition of Conrad, or perhaps Somerset Maugham, as a writer for whom the exoticism of foreign places allows for a heightened existence -- and for the illusion of liberation, of a different existence.

September 23, 1996artsReview

Book Review Desk

''My Secret History'' merges the two genres he's famous for - novels and travel writing - by giving us a first-person novel that consists mainly of the narrator's travels. Yet for every cheerful, world-revealing, extroverted incident in the previously published travelogues, Mr. Theroux here gives us the darker personal background.